Culture and Anarchy | Page 9

it has
dangers for us, we have seen that it leads to a narrow and twisted
growth of our religious side itself, and to a failure in perfection. But if
we tend to Hebraise even in an Establishment, with the main current of
national life flowing round us, and reminding us in all ways of the
variety and fulness of human existence,--by a Church which is
historical as the State itself is historical, and whose order, ceremonies,
and monuments reach, like those of the State, far beyond any fancies
and devisings of ours, and by institutions such as the Universities,
formed to defend and advance that very culture and many-sided
development which it is the danger of Hebraising to make us
neglect,--how much more must we tend to Hebraise when we lack these
preventives. One may say that to be reared a member of an
Establishment is in itself a lesson of religious moderation, and a help
towards [xxiii] culture and harmonious perfection. Instead of battling
for his own private forms for expressing the inexpressible and defining
the undefinable, a man takes those which have commended themselves
most to the religious life of his nation; and while he may be sure that
within those forms the religious side of his own nature may find its
satisfaction, he has leisure and composure to satisfy other sides of his
nature as well.
But with the member of a Nonconforming or self-made religious
community how different! The sectary's eigene grosse Erfindungen, as
Goethe calls them,--the precious discoveries of himself and his friends
for expressing the inexpressible and defining the undefinable in
peculiar forms of their own, cannot but, as he has voluntarily chosen
them, and is personally responsible for them, fill his whole mind. He is
zealous to do battle for them and affirm them, for in affirming them he
affirms himself, and that is what we all like. Other sides of his being
are thus neglected, because the religious side, always tending in every
serious man to predominance over our other spiritual sides, is in him
made quite absorbing and tyrannous by [xxiv] the condition of
self-assertion and challenge which he has chosen for himself. And just
what is not essential in religion he comes to mistake for essential, and a
thousand times the more readily because he has chosen it of himself;
and religious activity he fancies to consist in battling for it. All this

leaves him little leisure or inclination for culture; to which, besides, he
has no great institutions not of his own making, like the Universities
connected with the national Establishment, to invite him; but only such
institutions as, like the order and discipline of his religion, he may have
invented for himself, and invented under the sway of the narrow and
tyrannous notions of religion fostered in him as we have seen. Thus,
while a national Establishment of religion favours totality,
hole-and-corner forms of religion (to use an expressive popular word)
inevitably favour provincialism.
But the Nonconformists, and many of our Liberal friends along with
them, have a plausible plan for getting rid of this provincialism, if, as
they can hardly quite deny, it exists. "Let us all be in the same boat,"
they cry; "open the Universities to everybody, and let there be no
establishment of [xxv] religion at all!" Open the Universities by all
means; but, as to the second point about establishment, let us sift the
proposal a little. It does seem at first a little like that proposal of the fox,
who had lost his own tail, to put all the other foxes in the same boat by
a general cutting off of tails; and we know that moralists have decided
that the right course here was, not to adopt this plausible suggestion,
and cut off tails all round, but rather that the other foxes should keep
their tails, and that the fox without a tail should get one. And so we
might be inclined to urge that, to cure the evil of the Nonconformists'
provincialism, the right way can hardly be to provincialise us all round.
However, perhaps we shall not be provincialised. For the Rev. Edward
White says that probably, "when all good men alike are placed in a
condition of religious equality, and the whole complicated iniquity of
Government Church patronage is swept away, more of moral and
ennobling influence than ever will be brought to bear upon the action of
statesmen." We already have an example of religious equality in our
colonies. "In the colonies," says The Times, "we see religious
communities unfettered by [xxvi] State-control, and the State relieved
from one of the most troublesome and irritating of responsibilities." But
America is the great example alleged by those who are against
establishments for religion. Our topic at this moment